Early in Werner Herzog’s new documentary Theater of Thought (2024), we meet Bryan Johnson, a venture capitalist invested in a variety of science companies who founded the neurotech firm Kernel. We see Johnson and neuroscientist Rafael Yuste — who acts as Herzog’s cohost at times in the film — try on Kernel’s diagnostic helmets that monitor blood concentration in the brain, highlighting active areas with color. Yuste tests the helmets by telling an “outrageous” lie and seeing how his brain lights up. But the most outrageous thing he can think to say is that five plus five is 11, and the brain images don’t light up in any meaningful way. That anticlimax encapsulates much of the film, which is ostensibly about the technology’s capacity to illuminate the mysteries and extend the capacity of the human brain.
Johnson is a perfect character for Herzog, who built his career profiling colorful figures, ranging from a former prisoner of war who revisits the sites of his capture in Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) to an ill-fated amateur bear conservationist in Grizzly Man (2005). Unfortunately, you wouldn’t know this from Theater of Thought. Herzog describes Johnson in voiceover as “colorful,” but does not disclose that he’s on an obsessive, quixotic quest to reverse aging and defy death itself, often through scientifically questionable means. Instead, the film leaves him behind, following Herzog and Yuste on a road trip to speak with various experts about the evolving state of neuroscience and the many possibilities new technology offers the field.
The movie’s general looseness and heavy reliance on interview-based vignettes makes sense in light of its origins as a partnership between Herzog and Yuste’s Neurorights Foundation. The film is not quite an advertisement for the foundation, but it does seem guided by Yuste and his cohort’s concerns about subjects like legal protections for people’s mental data.
This, of course, begs the question of whether we’ll ever truly have the capability to turn human thought into readable data in the first place. When IBM Vice President Dario Gil explains quantum computing, Herzog speaks over him in narration to admit he has no idea what Gil is saying and that he suspects the audience doesn’t either. It’s a hilarious moment, pure Herzog, but he does often seem out of his depth in the film, and too willing to let his subjects make questionable claims without pushing back or delving deeper into what their ambitions and fears suggest about themselves and/or society. I’m also at a loss to explain the inclusion of certain segments, like a sitdown with famous World Trade Center wire-walker Philippe Petit. The man’s not uninteresting, but we’re not learning anything about the brain from him.
Herzog, however, sprinkles in enough grace notes to make Theater of Thought stand out. Few others would spend an extended amount of time capturing world-renowned brain scientist Christof Koch go through his morning rowing routine before speaking with him, or muse on the shortcomings of brain-scanning technology by pointing out how a dead fish showed cognitive activity on one device. And his much-memed style of narration is as engrossing as ever — there’s something deeply compelling about the way he says words like “Mormon” and “Siri” in his dulcet Bavarian cadence. Still, the film doesn’t evince the kind of philosophical resonance or sheer weirdness that we know Herzog is capable of.
Theater of Thought (2024), directed by Werner Herzog, is screening at Film Forum (209 West Houston Street, Greenwich Village, Manhattan) through December 26, 2026, and will screen at other select theaters nationwide in the coming months.
